@Færd similarly I've heard that because the party in power still is held back by the opposition party, the party in power can actually be more successful at getting pro-opposition laws passed (in the US, welfare reform by Clinton, by peace with China by Nixon)

@Cerberus I realize that was dense. eg the rights are in power, so you'd think they'd get all sort of rightist things approved like more money for killing things for the army. But there will be opposition to that (by he weaker opposition). But the rights can actually get real progress on left issues (that are palatable to the right), like those examples.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 OT tends to be paternalistic, authoritarian, vengeful. NT gospels tend to be 'turn the other cheek','wash the feet of the maid', be nice, NT Letters (mostly Paul) tend to be really uptight about sex

@Cerberus Welfare fits the Christian ethos better than the libertarian or militarist ethos

@Cerberus sorry, there's a lot of polysemy going on here. Yes, in the US at least the evangelical Christians tend to be far right. But the principles of Christ in the gospels tend to be more about helping the poor and marginalized, both of which principles seem to be also associated with the left.

Presumably there are different logical positions they could take: 1. the state shouldn't be involved, the church takes care of it, 2. the state should do it because it has the most power, 3. the state should be a Christian state thus mooting the issue, etc

@Cerberus sure. and there are the labels people tend to apply, like Christian, or the name of a church. There's a lot of possibilities. there are individuals who consider themselves Christian and have very particular stances on issues that may or may not coincide with much larger institutions that also call themselves Christian.

@Cerberus But the media reference to Christians, usually refers to politically active groups calling themselves Christian, and they tend to be on the right (as small special interest groups to the far-right in the US and large traditional parties on the center-right in Germany (I don't know about the Netherlands, and the French are godless communists and the English...pfft)

you said social cons and econ lib often go together. I presume that that is a right leaning party. since you then say that liberals or the left are econ lib too, then the only difference must be about social stuff, the right socially conservative and the left socially liberal

@Cerberus if you're going to say AHK, I actually have a better answer, which is to use the "international" keyboard layout, which I have installed, configured, and know how to use, but am too lazy to use.

ScotM was an active (and top-notch) participant at this site for about seven months (December 2014–July 2015), but he last answered a question at EL&U on July 20, 2015, and his profile lists him as "Last seen Jan 10 '16 at 8:27."
The problem I want to resolve involves his answer to Etymology of "...

@Tonepoet That's still not plagiarism. And not by SE's standards either:

> In the context of Stack Exchange sites, any copying and pasting of any amount of text or code that wasn't written by you is plagiarism if you try, explicitly or implicitly, to pass it off as your own work.

@Tonepoet Ah, no. That one is unequivocal and network-wide. Anything you post here is released under the CC-by-SA license and categorically does not belong to you. Or, rather, you give everyone the right to change it and use it as they wish.

So yes, there is absolutely no reason to refrain from editing when an OP is no longer active. You might choose to comment instead in cases where you know the OP is active so that they may edit as they see fit. That's just politeness though. Not a rule.

@terdon Even that much is somewhat inaccurate. The full license is rather complex and does require disclosure of what adaptations were made from the original work under section 3b. Granted, I believe our editing revisions cover that bit.

But the post is the area where text is displayed and the author is accredited as the primary author. The content of the post is the text that appears within it.

Anyway @Terdon, aside from the help center provision I cited, I did see a few relevant meta posts regarding the subject in the past. When I see them, I'll ping you but I'm not sure how to even hunt those down now.

You seem to be much more knowledgeable about the licensing details than I am so I won't argue the point. I do know, however, that the norm across all SE sites I am active in, is that editing is a good thing whenever it improves the post.

@Tonepoet Oh, I've read them, posted them, answered them. Take my word for it. I'm a mod on two sites, you wouldn't believe the number of times I've had to explain to users that if they don't like their posts being edited, they shouldn't be posting here.

@terdon I do realize that. The help center even says as much. That is part of why I am suggesting an edit. It's just that there's a point where the edits can go too far. It's hard to say where that is exactly isn't it?

@Tonepoet Yeah, that's true. My own take is I don't care. Any edit that makes the post better is fine. Then again, the edit culture on U&L is quite aggressive. I've seen cases where a crap answer was made into a great answer through extensive editing. And yes, that changed the OP's intent but nobody cared. We cared that what was the accepted answer (the OP didn't know any better) is now correct and that, IMO, should always be the final arbitrer.

That goes double when the OP is no longer active. In that case, I see absolutely no reason not to edit or even, if necessary, completely rewrite the answer as long as it's a correct edit.

On the other hand, I also acknowledge that the subject matter of ELU is more open to interpretation than that of the other, more technical, sites I am active in.

@Tonepoet if forced to be on a linear scale, linguistics is somewhere between biology and psychology. but as the comparisons are not exactly linear, yes, sociolinguistics tends towards the 'sciency horseshit' end of the scale.